Flowers go backwards in time, according to reports in ScienceDaily, LiveScience and ScienceShots 1 October 2013 and Frontiers in Plant Science, 2013 DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2013.00344. Peter Hochuli, of University of Zürich, and Susanne Feist-Burkhardt have found fossil pollen grains in two drilling cores from northern Switzerland. According to ScienceDaily: “An uninterrupted sequence of fossilized pollen from flowers begins in the Early Cretaceous, approximately 140 million years ago, and it is generally assumed that flowering plants first evolved around that time”. These new fossils are dated as 100 million years older, being dated as “Middle Triassic, 247.2–242.0 Ma” (Ma - million years old). The scientists found six different types of pollen, indicating there was a variety of flowering plants growing at the time this pollen was buried.

According to Live Science “The ancestors of flowering plants currently remain a mystery, and scientists aren’t sure what kind of events or conditions might have spurred their origin”. Peter Hochul commented: “This sudden appearance has bothered scientists ever since Darwin, who called the origin of flowering plants an ‘abominable mystery’”. He went on to say: “So far, no direct ancestors of flowering plants are known. Some groups of plants are suspected to be closely related. But the evidence is weak, and most of these groups are thought to be too specialized to be at the base of the flowering plants”. ScienceShots commented: “But pushing the origin of flowering plants into the Middle Triassic period presents a new puzzle: explaining a 100-million-year gap in the fossil record”.

Editorial Comment: Let us predict that all attempts to explain the origin of flowering plants from non-flowering ancestor fossils will prove to be futile. Finding fossil evidence of flowers, such as these pollen grains, only proves flowering plants already existed whenever the sediment they are buried in was laid down. If you believe non-flowering plants evolved into flowering plants, then you strike that major obstacle all living plants show - that they reproduce after their kind, just as Genesis says. In fact, the origin of flowering plants is only an “abominable mystery” to those, like Darwin and his successors, who refuse to believe the record left by the only witness to the origin of plants – the God who created them. (Ref. angiosperms, palynology, botany)